Prepare for payments
June 3, 2019
The middle of the year is Copyright Agency’s busiest time for making payments.
We make payments to a whole range of member types – so authors (such as journalists and education resource writers), visual artists (including illustrators, cartoonists and photographers), publishers and surveyors.
The copyright fees come from a variety of sources including schools, universities, private colleges, TAFEs, State and Federal Governments plus businesses.
In June and July, we will distribute $49m to members from the annual Schools distribution and $6.9m in the Universities distribution.
A new agreement with the school sector was negotiated earlier this year for a four-year period. The fee will decline gradually over that period, but, positively, the agreement commits schools and Copyright Agency to working together on a new measurement system to capture usage; and allows either party to go to the Copyright Tribunal if we cannot agree on the most reliable ways to measure usage.
Schools have also agreed to explore with Copyright Agency fresh digital solutions to help teachers better access copyright content for education application.
University revenue has been affected by the current litigation with Universities Australia. If you want to know more, contact memberservices@copyright.com.au
Are your details up to date?
If you are expecting a payment, remember to check that we have your most up-to-date bank and contact details by logging into your online member account.
Need help logging into your account?
Click here to log into your online account. Your username is your email address. If you have forgotten your password, click on ‘Forgotten Password’ and follow the prompts.
If you are expecting to receive a payment in either distribution and are not the sole rightsholder, you might need to share the payment with your co-authors or publisher.
The Notes section of your payment summary provides information to help you determine if you need to share the payment. Read more in the Help Centre.
How to determine whether you need to share a payment
Check your contract
In some cases, we pay one rightsholder a 100% allocation for a work. The rightsholder is then obliged under their contract to share the payment with any other rightsholders. If you receive a payment from us, check your publishing contract for any amount you may need to share. Read more in the Help Centre.
Contact your publisher if necessary
If you can’t find the contract or are unsure about what to do, contact your publisher.
Confirmation that a payment has been shared
We may contact you to confirm that your legal obligations to share a payment have been met.
Don’t want to manage sharing arrangements?
If you would prefer not to have to make on-payments to others, please let us know. We will then make payments to your publisher who can share the payments with you in accordance with your contract.
When you don’t have to share a payment
You don’t have to share a payment if you are the sole rightsholder (e.g. rights have reverted to you from a publisher under your publishing contract).
You also don’t have to share a payment if Copyright Agency has been notified about all of the shares between the various rightsholders (the contract ‘splits’). In this case, we pay each rightsholder directly in accordance with the contract.
If the rights have reverted to you or you have any other questions, please alert us by emailing the Copyright Agency Member Services Team at memberservices@copyright.com.au.
More information
See the Help Centre for more information about distribution of licence fees and payments.